Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Yes it's a short story, but if you're not into reading fiction on the internet, it's a very short story, part of the 'Den Of Eek' anthology which has just been released on Kindle, with proceeds going to support cancer charities, as part of DenOfGeek.com's Geeks Vs Cancer appeal. Each story deals with the theme of urban legends.

I read this story as part of an event last Halloween, and was lucky enough to go last (everyone's receptive to the final story of an evening because then they can go to the loo qualm-free). I've never read a story out loud before, and there turned out to be a surprising amount of adrenaline involved, basically because the feedback loop for a scriptwriter is usually, at best, six months-ish, so hearing people's reactions seconds after I've flapped some wordings from my mouthhole was a weirdly new experience.

A lot of this story is in the reading, so you have to imagine my voice, which is like a cross between Benedict Cumberbatch and Jon Hamm but sexier than I've made that sound ANYWAY SHUT UP JAMES DO THE STORY.

There’s A Worm At The Bottom Of The Garden

That thing that every barcode has to contain the number
‘666’ or it doesn’t work? Or if you pull a face and the wind changes, you’ll
get stuck like it? Or that thing about the dead granny on the car roof? My dad
made all those up.

Dad loved his little stories. He was a writer, although if
he’d told anyone that, he’d have had to kill them. Or give their name and
address to a third party a couple of doors down who’d do it in-house. If he
ever did have to tell people where he worked, he usually said Health and
Safety. Which was true. Kind of.

It had all begun in World War Two. The British government
had cracked the whole radar thing, and the Germans wanted to know how their bombers
were suddenly being located in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night by
Hurricanes and Spitfires that had come seemingly hundreds of miles out of their
way for no good reason.

The explanation the British Government came up with was
‘carrots’. Two thriller writers and a librarian were pulled out of their normal
duties and told to come up with a story that sounded good, before the Germans
made the connection with the oddly-shaped concrete structures on the Kent coast
and realised the Brits had the ability to see flying things and floating things
from quite a long way away, and we lost our advantage for good. What the
writers came up with was ‘carrots’.

Specifically, that carrots gave their consumers excellent
night vision, and that the British populace had started eating carrots dawn,
noon and night, and consequently every spotter on the ground, every plucky
pilot with a handlebar moustache, every old maid cycling to church with a cold
beer or something, had consequently developed hawklike 20/20 vision and the
ability to spot a Heinkel bomber ten miles away on a dark night even in thick
cloud.

The story was printed out and passed on to trusted agents
who began spreading it in every tavern, teashop and town hall in the land. The
Germans bought it. And the British bought more carrots. Many many more carrots.
Because of the night vision thing. Which was why, when the Germans finally did
twig radar, the two conscripted novelists and the librarian weren’t sent back
to their units, but given a nice office and told to keep coming up with the stories,
even after the war ended, the government thinking: if a made up story can sell
carrots without even trying, how far can we take this thing if we really go for
it? And thus the secret government department of UrbLeg was created.

The plan was to release controlled legends in conflict
areas, carefully engineering flawed narratives into each story’s DNA, rendering
them unbelievable once they had spread beyond a certain point. So by the time
people started comparing notes and saying things like ‘Hey, if that thing with
the clown and the scorpion is true, who the hell is telling the story?’, the damage was done, the seed of doubt sown,
the regime destabilised, the rebellion suppressed.

Of course, it couldn’t work forever. Rival nation states
quickly worked out what was going on, and began setting up their own UrbLeg
departments, often contracting their best literary talents to work undercover.
Early experiments often ended in failure: French weaponised narratives often
imploded in ennui, the Russians’ went on for so long, and so gloomily, many of
their targets simply wandered off, and the Americans included such overt
product placement, the targets became suspicious. ‘And the murderer was calling
from inside the house! On a Bell Electric Western System telephone, which has
great audio clarity and comes in a variety of colours!’

It was bad enough that when these narratives met each other
in the wild they started mating, creating thousands of bastard anecdotes with
minor variations, each a little more macabre, a little more likely to dig in
with it story hooks and be carried to places UrbLegs were never meant to go.
Bad enough that they started coming home to roost, the creator of the ‘spiders
bursting out of the boil on the girl’s cheek’ story hearing it told back to him
just three weeks after he’d generated it after a bad marital breakup and way
too much coffee. But worse, far worse, was what a squad of brutally conscripted
magical realists locked in a bunker somewhere in South America managed to do,
sometime around the early Seventies.

My dad had just started working at UrbLeg then, recruited
after his regularly rejected series of children’s stories called ‘The Constant
and Depressing Deaths of Tiny Emil and His Friend Harbottle” had come to the
attention of a high-up civil servant with an eye for talent, and positions to
fill after a number of internal breakdowns. And so his first day at work, my
father heard the gasps of disbelief, and saw the trembling hands clutching
faxes, that announced the first weaponised narrative had gone meta.

Out there, in the South American rainforest, the magical
realists, who already had a bad rep for playing with nested narratives, had
gone completely, bug-eyed insane, and created an urban legend that had turned
itself into a coherent system of interrelated and sequentially organized
stories sharing a common rhetorical desire to resolve a conflict by
establishing audience expectations according to the known trajectories of their
literary and rhetorical form. Shit had got real.

A United Nations approved list of literary critics were
parachuted into the jungle, fighting three days and three nights until the
breakout was suppressed, every single one desperate to point out the irony that
they were critiquing urban legends in a singularly rural environment, but all
the time knowing introducing one more ounce of self-awareness could turn the
whole thing really fucking icky. Finally it was over, loose story threads
burned from the trees by flamethrowers, every last potential sequel stamped
squealing into the blackened ground, and my father and his new co-workers
gathered round a speaker listening to the whole thing.

After that, it could never be business as usual. The South
Americans had made a crack in the world, and it was only a mater of time until
something forced its way through. Things quietened down, ambitions lessened.
UrbLeg started restricting itself to homilies, minor anecdotes, satirical
nursery rhymes. Many of the staff were laid off, and when I replaced my dad
after he died after a thing in ninety-six, UrbLeg was down to three people. The
internet gave us a brief resurgence, but was really just cranking out umpteen
variations on the same old ‘waking up without kidneys’ stories on various
forums. Still, it paid the mortgage.

Until the Coalition took over. One day, without warning, we
were all sacked. And the next day, rehired again, on zero hour contracts by
StoryCorp the same large corporation, with fingers in television, films and
advertising that had, as far as we could tell, taken over every urban legend
generation department across the known world.

For three days, nothing happened. There were rumours we were
being integrated into viral marketing units, maybe doing some ARGs for some
upcoming computer game. Then the order came, to every UrbLeg department across
the world, just two sentences, one little story we had to get out to every
sentient being on the planet. Our terms of employment ended after this last
job, and we couldn’t help noting StoryCorp didn’t appear to have made any long
terms plans for paying gas or electric on our building either.

The new story was “There’s a worm at the bottom of the
garden, and his name is GARKASH THE DESTROYER, BRINGER OF THE END TIMES, DEVOURER
OF HOPE. Please do not resist his coming”.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

I have been in London doing script readthroughs for The Delivery Man. A script 'readthrough' is where you read 'through' a script, where would you be without this blog and its industry insights eh, NOWHERE FAST that's where.

Junior actors, or 'actlets' get very excited about readthroughs, because they think it is an opportunity to try out different voices, and add or take away bits of dialogue depending on how clever they are feeling that morning, but they are WRONG, a script readthrough is mostly to see if the script is as long as the telly slot it is supposed to be fitting into. Ideally just a little bit longer, so if anything goes wrong you have stuff to cut, rather than being too short so that you have to add stage directions like 'everyone stares into space for 1min 32 seconds' like Pinter did WE'RE ON TO YOU PINTER.

If it's too long, that's not good, unless it's exactly twice as long, in which case you cut it in two and phone the broadcaster and say 'hey, good news, we have an extra episode!', which is more or less what happened with episodes eight and nine of Green Wing series one. #true

In case you don't believe I was in a 'room' with 'actors', here is a photo of me with 'actor' Alex MacQueen, who played Julius in The Thick Of It and is thus a hero to @Patroclus, who insisted I had my picture taken with him.

It turns out this is a great way to divide and conquer actors and thus let them know who's boss, by casually announcing 'my wife has insisted I take a 'selfie' with one of you BUT ONLY ONE WHO COULD IT BE'. Cue actors flicking their eyes from side to side with increasing nervousness over potential loss of status as I walk slowly around the room saying things like 'lalalala it could be you- BUT IT'S NOT, maybe it's this actor NO IT ISN'T, here we go it's Alex'.

It has been pointed out that Alex looks almost more excited to meet me than I was to meet him, which only emphasises how good an actor he is, and all the other ones could learn from him and his positive attitude.

Anyway, we start the readthrough, then realise no-one is available to time it.

ME: Where is Chris, the First Assistant Director? For usually it is he who times these readthroughs.

So I volunteered to time the readthrough, which disappointed everyone in the room because they were secretly hoping I would read some lines, at which I am very good. They didn't say anything, but I knew that's what they were thinking. However, now I had to not read lines and turn my phone back on, because I had turned it off so it didn't ring during the readthrough, which was very professional of me, I think.

Long silence.

DIRECTOR: Can we start now?

ME: My phone is still starting up.

Long silence. Eventually my phone makes a small beeping noise and something swims to the surface of the picture bit, 'screen', that's the word I was looking for.

ME: (helpfully) This phone is a Samsung Pocket Geo!

Everyone absorbs this information.

DIRECTOR: Now can we start?

ME: It's just sorting out its icons.

Further silence.

ME: Ooh, I've got Google+ on this, that's bound to come in handy at some point.

Bit more silence.

ME: Nearly there.

ACTOR: We could use my phone if it's-

ME: LOOK I HAVE ONE JOB ALL RIGHT?

Phone beeps.

ME: (calmly, with air of authority) You may all proceed.

I can now announce the following scoop, which will surely be in all the major media outlets seconds after I press 'Publish', that Episode 4 currently runs at thirty minutes twenty eight seconds, which is a bit long for an ITV half hour, which is twenty two minutes twenty seconds.